Protect your Pen-drives from viruses by disabling autorun!

Well most of the times that your pen drive get's infected is usually due to plugging in a previously infected pendrive to a PC and then plugging yours to the same.
If you've got your "Folder Options" missing, "Regedit" missing or your usb devices not opening in Windows Explorer, it's most usually because you're infected with a virus.
Well, an anti-virus scan and a spyware removal tool would help you get rid of the virus, but then you've got to be careful not to get infected again!

Most viruses spread by utilizing the autorun.inf file that autmatically runs every time you plug-in your pen drive to your computer. They configure the autorun file to launch the virus-executables that may be bundled along with the autroun.inf file on your pendrive. And thats how they spread from machine to machine, cripplings systems along the way.

So how I'll try to help you here is by disabling the autorun feature which would minimize the chances infection considerably incase an infected pendrive is plugged into your comp.
Also, we'll see how to prevent viruses from infecting pen drives that are plugged into your computer.

1. Disabling the Autorun feature.
Simply fire up your registry editor. (Start>Run>regedit)
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows
\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Now double click the value ""NoDriveTypeAutoRun" and set the Hex value to "ff" or the Decimal value to "255".
Hit F5 (to refresh your registry editor) and you're done.
Autorun.inf will no longer be executed automatically.

2. Prevent Autorun.inf files being writted to your pen drives.
All you've got to do here is create a folder named "Autorun.inf" without the quotes!

(Headover to folder options and unhide file extensions incase it isn't already.)
These files should prevent malicious autorun files from infecting your pendrive.

Thats it! :)
These 2 steps should minimize (if not immunize) your pendrives from viruses to quite an extent!
Incase you still need some more help on this topic, ask away!